Category: Learning

  • Rob Kolstad is an Asshole

    This month’s Wired has a great article (not online yet, so no link) by Jason Fagone about the International Olympiad in Informatics where high school students from all over the world compete to solve problems through software. It’s fiercely competitive and has its own sub culture of super stars, namely Gennady Korotkevich of Belarus, who…

  • Scariest thing I’ve read all year: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

    When Will Ferrel describes his George W Bush impression, he says he just imagines having a lot of “unearned confidence.” How would you know if you were one of these people? I first heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect in a comment on Hacker News and it immediately made me question a lot of things. The…

  • Am I Achieving My 2010 Goals?

    Ouch. I just looked up my goals for 2010 and I am NOT doing well. Here’s my progress so far. 1. Read 12 Books – Easily completed this already. A few I listened to using Audible.com and I read the Purple Cow on my iPhone with the Kindle app. So far I’ve read The Visual…

  • Tufte Course Review and Notes

    Yesterday I attended Ed Tufte’s one day course on Presenting Data and Information. His book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, completely changed the way I think about data. If you love his book, I highly recommend his course. He doesn’t cover a lot of new ground, but he puts emphasis on a few things…

  • HOWTO: Give a Best Man Toast

    So your brother / best friend / college buddy asked you to be his best man and you’ve planned the bachelor party, got measured for your tux, held on to the rings, and watched the groom get married. Now it’s your turn to give the toast. It’s by far the most nerve racking part of…

  • Large Hadron Collider Started Up

    The search of the mass giving Higgs-Boson particle is underway! ?Luckily we didn’t get sucked into a black hole like everyone thought we might. Large Hadron Collider

  • Large Hadron Collider… COUNTDOWN

    Only a couple weeks until they fire up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Never heard of it?? From wikipedia: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator complex intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the standard model, the current…

  • Getting Things Done

    I heard about David Allen’s Getting Things Done a long time ago and I procrastinated in getting it.? It sounded like a system I could use, since my day usually consists of handling (and keeping track of!) a thousand tiny tasks.? I got the book for Christmas and according to my wife it’s the best…

  • Great Word

    This is an awesome word: Grandiloquent – Characterized by language that is elevated and sometimes pompous in style: